剋利福德·格爾茲（Clifford Geertz,1926—2006），1926年生於美國加州，在俄亥俄州安蒂奧剋學院學習文學和哲學，1950年在該校獲哲學學士學位。之後進入哈佛大學，師從C.剋拉剋洪學習人類學並於1956年獲得人類學博士學位。曾先後在芝加哥大學、斯坦福大學、麻省理工學院、普林斯頓高等研究院社會科學部等著名學府講學或擔任教職。

作為象徵人類學和解釋人類學的代錶人物，格爾茲以其在印度尼西亞和摩洛哥的田野工作為基礎，對宗教、文化等領域的研究影響巨大，著有：《爪哇宗教》（1960）、《被信奉的伊斯蘭教》（1968）、《文化的解釋》（1973）、《尼加拉：19世紀巴厘劇場國傢》（1980）、《地方性知識》（1983）、《論著與生活》（1988），《追尋事實》（1995）等，並先後獲得瞭美國社會學會索羅金奬、美國人文－自然科學院社會科學奬、日本福岡“亞洲奬大奬”等多項榮譽。

格爾茲無疑是是近幾十年來人類學界中最有影響的人物，但是其影響遠不止此，在人類學之外，哲學、語言學、組織研究、文學批評等領域都可見格爾茲的影響，其“農業內捲化”、“地方性知識”、“作為意義體係的宗教”、“解釋之解釋”、“深描”等概念或方法不僅在人類學界廣為流傳，也被其他學科所引用。

The illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories-this is magic, that is technology-has long since been exploded. What it is instead, however, is less clear. That it might be a kind of writing, putting things to paper, has now and then occurred to those engaged in producing it, consuming it, or both. But the examination of it as such has been impeded by several considerations, none of them very reasonable. One of these, especially weighty among the producers, has been simply that it is an unanthropological sort of thing to do. What a proper ethnographer ought properly to be doing is going out to places, coming back with information about how people live there, and making that information available to the professional community in practical form, not lounging about in libraries reflecting on literary questions. Excessive concern, which in practice usually means any concern at all, with how ethnographic texts are constructed seems like an unhealthy self-absorption-time wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. The advantage of shifting at least part of our attention from the fascinations of field work, which have held us so long in thrall, to those of writing is not only that this difficulty will become more clearly understood, but also that we shall learn to read with a more percipient eye. A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession, as conventionally, from Tylor) of asseverational prose and literary innocence is long enough.